David Emery Online

Licensing Stupidity

22 November 2006

So, you’ve come up with a slightly new interface concept.

It’s not the most radical idea in the world – it builds on lots of existing UI elements – but it works pretty nicely and you’re pretty chuffed with it.

Baring in mind that people have tried and failed many times before to sue people for copying UI ideas and elements…

...what do you do?

Microsoft announce their Office User Interface Licensing program

Well done, guys. Well done.

I’m a fan of the new ribbon UI – it’s a big step forward for Office, and I applaud Microsoft for daring to try something radical on their flagship product. But this is such a traditional Microsoft move it really makes you stop and think – all the “we’ve changed – we’re nice now” PR really is just rubbish.

For a start, to use a “Ribbon” Microsoft are claiming that you have to agree to a 120 page licensing document. It contains a full set of usage guidelines, some of which you have to abide by – other wise you break the terms of the license – and some that are just recommendations.

This sounds like a good idea in theory – if all ribbon style UI elements work in the same way then obviously the user benefits, and the learning curve for each is reduced. But, in doing that you’ve put yourself entirely at Microsoft’s mercy. If they’ve made a bad decision; specified the wrong behaviour in a specific use case – sorry, you don’t have a choice. Your app has to behave the way they want.

So you have hundreds of your users emailing you going “can this work like that” or “I can’t figure out how to do x”. You can’t do anything about it without breaking the terms of the license.

I wonder if Microsoft will do your support for you?

The other details of this are yet more amusing; you don’t get any code to help you implement it, just a big specification – as Apple has discovered with Interface Builder, providing code that’s easy to deploy makes interface consistency a lot easier for developers to handle. Also, if you’re making a competitor app to Office – like a word processor, spreadsheet or presentation app – sorry, you can’t have a license.

It’s all bullshit Microsoft; you know it, we know it – why even bother?